Whitehorse councillor Steve Roddick put forward a motion to declare a climate change emergency.
“Emergency” might appear to some to be a provocative term given that most of us are living in, what appears to be, a fairly safe and stable “bubble”.
The bubble, unfortunately, is an illusion of denial or lack of a comprehensive big picture understanding. Councillor Roddick is doing noble work in championing the need to declare an emergency so that planning and resources can be put in place for when the “bubble” bursts or erodes around us. It WILL happen!
Devastation will either creep into our life-scape or come crashing in. Be it in the next few years, or decades, or hundreds of years.
Bad news climate change is only one symptom in the bad news spectrum that will affect or is affecting humanity and a myriad of other life forms.
The current economic model based on perpetual growth driven by consumption cannot last. Either we come together, on a pan-global level, and dismantle our First World fantasy way of being, or the card house of fiat and crypto currencies, and the degradation of Earth’s eco-systems will fall on our heads.
We, as the current version of humanity, can either wake up to harsh realities and start to “turn the wheel” in humanity’s trajectory, or continue to offload our responsibilities onto future generations as we continue to bloat humanity with foolishness.
It might be possible to make those shifts without sacrificing authentic joys and a sense of hopefulness. A possibility but not a guarantee. Do we drown ourselves and the future in our status quo? Or initiate a multi-generational project to bring humanity together as a cohesive unit?
How do we start? First of all, by all of us being guides, teachers, and exemplars to all emerging versions of humanity. We don’t know how to do the future in a good way, but we might as a collective array of thought and spirit. It needs to be coded into our deep cultural DNA.
Councillor Roddick’s motion, the reducing-reusing-recycling movement, the Standing Rock pipeline resistance, the Occupy demonstrations, Occupy Wall Street, and a host of other social movements are all necessary efforts to shift our way of being on planet Earth.
It might take 100,000 years before we come out the other end. Or, we might be able to quick fixes of our foreground existential threats. Or… our hominid species, the life-form that carries the human spirit, might just end sooner, through our folly, rather than an accepted ending in a natural die-off. Everything has an end-point. No exceptions. It’s time to shift our gaze from the glare to the real.
Norman Holler
Whitehorse, Yukon